April 19, 2005

Princeton Starts Einstein Light Relay

PRINCETON, N.J. (AP) -- Physicists and Albert Einstein buffs began flipping light switches and dialing phones Monday night in an attempt at a worldwide relay of lights to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Einstein's death.

The relay got under way at 8:45 p.m. with the illumination of the football stadium and two towers on the Princeton University campus. From there, about 140 groups planned to illuminate everything from campus structures to private homes, one right after another, in a relay across the country.

Organizers were then expected to take the relay around the world, using the telephone on some legs of the journey, said Claire Gmachl, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Princeton who was organizing the start of the relay. She said phone calls travel over fiber-optic cables, which make them lights, in a sense.

The event, organized by Dr. Max Lippitsch, a physicist at the University of Graz in Austria, has drawn some criticism from astronomers concerned about light pollution.

Einstein, who lived and worked in Princeton from 1933 until his death on April 18, 1955, published three groundbreaking papers on physics in 1905. One of them laid out what is now known as the Theory of Relativity, which deals with the nature of light.

The 100th anniversary of the papers is also being celebrated by the World Year of Physics.